Last night on Beats 1 Julie caught up with her UK Represent for the week, British singer-songwriter Samm Henshaw and premiered music from his forthcoming Sound Experiment 2 EP.
'Easy' was a World Exclusive on the show last night and Samm talked to Julie about how he got into music, what the future holds and his upcoming gig at Somerset House.
'Our Love' was inspired directly by Samm's childhood growing up in South London, and the experience of his parents (who are originally from Nigeria). "I wrote 'Our Love," he says now, "about a story my Dad tells from when he first started dating my Mum: his family didn't approve, but he didn't care."
On his new track "Our Love"
It's about a story my dad told me when he met my mum, basically his mum and dad and brothers and sisters just weren't really into my mum, they weren't into him dating her, they just felt she was like, I don't think they thought she was a bad person but they just felt like they were losing him and they were spending more time with her. So, it was just based around that, and he was just kind of saying they didn't really understand that we loved each other and what it was, but it wasn't their place to understand, it was for them two understand between the two of them, so it's just not allowing his family to influence where he was heading with my mum I guess. And yeah they've been married for 27 years now. It was definitely worth it, they could've just been like "no we're gonna stay together" and then 4 weeks later like "yeah she wasn't the one".
My dad is a reverend, so I was born and brought up in a Church, not literally born in a Church, but my first memories were in Church, so I grew up surrounded by that, and my parents loved playing music around the house, so they're not musicians, my dad is a horrible singer, but there was just music always playing around the house so I always heard it, and it became this natural thing of loving music, and then obviously being in Church I'd see so many young people playing in the Worship team, so me, I was so inspired by it. I was just like, I want to do that, and ended up picking it up. I started playing drums when I was about 4, went on to playing the piano at about 12/13, and then picked up guitar later on and then eventually started singing.
The most favourite/inspiring part of music
I think it was and still is learning, and experiencing different things and moments with those instruments. If I learn a new chord on the guitar or new keys, it's just exciting to be something you can then contribute to what you're going to play and do later on. So, every time I learn something new, even like a vocal rift, if I learn any vocal rift or if I can find out I can hit any note, I just get super excited.
On the EP
I think everyone should be asking the question is how do I feel that my band stole my EP name, because that's exactly what happened. So one day, we were rehearsing, so I was with my band mates and I think this was when we just sort of started and I was super excited, and they were like "oh we need a name" and I was like "no you don't really need a name" and they were like "no we do", and I was like okay cool, so they're sitting down and coming up with all these names, and my guitarist was like "Sound Experiment" and I was like, dude, that's my EP, and he was like "yeah yeah yeah, but like we can be the Sound Experiment too" and I was just like errrrr, and I was against it for so long, I'm still like not even that, not even 100% cool with it still, but I think it's just kind of caught on a bit, but I kind of want to finish all the Sound Experiments, I don't know how many more I'm going to make but I just want to finish doing the Sound Experiment before call them The Sound Experiment so it doesn't confuse people, but I feel like it just hasn't worked.
On his track "Easy"
I think, for me the song was just about being able to… For me I feel like there was a lot of times where we feel like as people, there's no one we can be accountable to, or no one we can speak to or have a chat to if we're going through something, and I think the song is about saying, look, it would've been so much easier if I did have that person around in the times when I was going through problems and through the times when I was struggling and so forth, so that's pretty much what I would say it's about.
On the future
There's definitely going to be a lot more, I'm going to be playing at Somerset House, I'm opening up for James Morrison which is going to be fun, I'm going to be doing festivals in Paris, some in Germany, pretty much the UK and just Europe, we're travelling around a bit. The thought of an album scares me right now, I've got to commit to one thing, but we are working on songs and putting them together. I think when the time is right and we have all the songs we'll be like "hey album", but right now we're making songs so we'll see what it's going towards.